Google lets publishers limit access to news content

Google is to allow publishers to limit the amount of access users have to their content each day, in a move that follows attacks on the search giant by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Google is updating its First Click Free programme so that publishers can limit users to five free accesses per user each day.

Following the five free clicks, users “may start to see a registration page after you’ve clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day,” said Josh Cohen, Google senior business product manager.

The First Click Free programme previously treated every first click from a user as free, allowing them to keep accessing subscription sites for free, as long as they clicked through to it from a particular article on Google.

Users will now only be able to do this five times a day if the publisher has joined the programme.

Google will also be crawling, indexing and treating as “free” any preview pages on subscription-based sites made available to it by publishers.

Google will then label these stories as “subscription” in Google News.

Cohen said: “As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both – the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

“We think [the updated First Click Free program] still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.”

Media commentator Raymond Snoddy has asked how publishers can close the Pandora’s box of free news and today’s announcement from Google could go some way to answering that question.